About third party cookies
The usage of third party cookies in the ad technology industry is quickly declining as Safari and Firefox already block third party cookies, with Chrome to follow soon.
Due to these developments, features that rely on the acceptance of third party cookies (i. e. Equativ’s cookies) stop working: frequency capping,
audience targeting, DSP user match synchronization, unique visitor reporting (deduplicated visits) etc.
To compensate for the loss of third party cookies, the industry is shifting towards alternatives such as Universal ID, e-mail/login based user Ids, single sign on authentication etc. (for more details, see
Extended User Identification)
Another alternative is to leverage first party cookies for user identification as described in this article.
Leveraging first party cookies
How it works
To leverage first party cookies for user identification, publishers must:
- create a new cookie stored on the publisher’s own domain (first party cookie) or re-use an existing cookie with a unique user Id
- store a unique Id for each new user in this cookie; the user Id must be strictly unique to the given user; publishers must never assign a user Id to multiple users!
- send the user Id in the ad request to Equativ
Benefits
By leveraging first party cookies for user identification, some features become available again:
- frequency capping
- unique visitor reporting
- audience targeting; for audience targeting to work, the audience data provider (DMP) must use the same user Ids as the ones stored in first party cookies (more details about DMP integrations here); note that audience targeting with Equativ's data marketplace will not work with user Ids from first party cookies because it relies on third party cookies
Limitations
The following limitations apply when first party cookies are used for user identification:
- the user Id can be set for a single domain only; at this time, publishers with multiple domains cannot leverage first party cookies across multiple domains
- in case of DMPs syncing segments with Equativ, the DMP must use the same user Ids as the ones stored in the first party cookie
Sending user Ids from first party cookies
Sending user Ids in smart.js integrations
A “smart.js integration” is a client side integration where Equativ ad tags are integrated in the website and trigger the ad request. In this case, you can pass the user Id using the parameter
uid, as explained in chapter “Setting up the ad manager” in the article
Tagging guide 1 - overview.
Sample
sas.cmd.push(function () {
sas.setup(
{
uid: 123
}
);
});
Sending user Ids in Ad API integrations
An “Ad API integration” is typically a server side integration, where the ad request originates from another server. In this case, you can pass the user Id with the
uid parameter, as explained under “First-level parameters” > “Other parameters” in the
Ad API - reference article.
Sample
{
"networkId": 458,
...
"ads": [
{
"formatId": 84313,
...
}
],
"uid": 123,
...
}
